The Kanshou (Earthkeep)

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The Kanshou (Earthkeep) Page 8

by Sally Miller Gearhart


  "Jez!" Zude began.

  Jez stopped her with a quick and firm blow of the whip handle to Zude's shoulder. "Hear me out!" she ordered.

  In that moment, a look passed over Zude's face. Jez's eyes widened and froze on the spectacle of her own gesture and the display of Zude's unequivocal reaction. At that sight, unbidden blood surged to her cheeks and a fierce burst of satisfaction flamed through her body. She fingered the whip, her breath rising slowly toward some long-hungered promise. Then, without warning, brand new eyes embraced the scene. Her stomach turned to bilge water.

  "Forget it!" she cried, flinging the whip at Zude. She lunged toward the bed. "Forget it!" She began gathering her clothes, tugging on her breeks over her naked body.

  Zude stared at her in silence. When Jez froze in the midst of dressing and met Zude's gaze, her lover said quietly, "Come with me, Jezebel. Come to the party with me."

  They stared at each other, unmoving. Then Jezebel thrust her chin forward. "I'll do that," she said. "I'll go with you to your party." She sank to the bed. "But I need some sleep now, Zudie."

  Both women sighed. Then Zude doused the light and settled by Jezebel under the thin sheet. A breeze swept lightly over their bodies. "We're okay, love," Zude whispered, "aren't we?"

  Jez put her arm around Zude, turning her onto her own supine body, maneuvering Zude's head onto her shoulder. "We're fine, Zudie," she whispered back, holding the strong body tight against her. "We're fine."

  Moments later, tensions eased, they lay in spoon and sang together an incantation, ancient and forever new, for the sleep of loving women:

  "I seek the darkness as of old

  With you I trust the Earth to hold

  and cradle me in worlds untold,

  to dare the death within our slumber.

  "I sink, and unencumbered spin.

  I swoop the caverns of the wind.

  I number those who are my kin

  as all who do not cage another.

  "Come, woman, partner of my rest

  we join our lives in sisterquest

  and plunge the hidden learningfest

  where all of life will surge before us."

  Jez awakened slowly into Hong Kong's pre-dawn hush. She lay beside Zude, on her back, idly monitoring her lover's soft snores.

  Then she gasped, suddenly aware that her body was rising upward, being lifted by strong hands straight through the ceiling of the room, through the roof. On her left, a wild-haired old hag held her close to her side; on her right a younger woman clasped her equally close. They carried her between them, upward in their flight pod, high above the city and toward a rising sun.

  "You're too antsy, girl," cracked the voice to her left. Jez turned to find bright black eyes studying her. "You got to let up," the old woman snapped, pressing her mouth into a tight line as she squinted at her.

  "Who are you?" Jezebel asked.

  "You can think of me as a guide," said the younger woman to her right. Jez turned to see a Jezebel with greying hair, and the same smile that greeted her in every mirror. "I'm your Future Self," the woman added.

  "And I'm her Ganeshananda," rasped the old woman at her other side, "that's a helper, somebody that removes obstacles for you. Tonight I'm here to help with the transportation," she added with a toothless grin. Her body banked right to turn the flying spoon southward over the sea. They soared higher. "You been getting mighty disconnected lately, girl," the old crone said. "We figured you could do with a little high fresh air."

  Jez nodded. She folded herself closer into the warm embrace of the women, letting the cool dawn clear her head. "You're just in time," she said to them conversationally, as the flight pod sailed over the sun-drenched sea. "I need a guide, right now. Something to help me with these . . . these contradictions!"

  The Future Jezebel laughed. "I remember. You keep trying to resolve them." She raised her arm and the flight pod angled westward, trailed by the new day. "You can't resolve them, you know. You just live on them."

  "Hold them and love them," croaked the crone, "and let them be!"

  "But I'm an Amah cadet" Jez protested, "and a hypocrite! How can I wear that uniform?"

  "Wear the uniform as long as you can. Then you'll no longer wear it," said her Future Self.

  "So I'll just 'know?'"

  "You'll know," the Future Jezebel assured her. "Trust your sacred powers. They can do no harm. Only if you disconnect from who you are could you misuse them."

  A loud cackle broke the sound of the wind around the flight pod. "Hold on," shouted the crone. Her hand shot upward and the flight pod swooped into a high backward roll. Jez gasped watching the coastal hills spin below her. Jez caught the smile of her Older Self and let it mellow into a full-throated laugh. The three women laughed their way back toward the east again, driving into a blinding sun. They banked and dipped over shorelines and lush gardens, and when Hong Kong lay below them, they plummeted into its lap.

  "Bella-Belle!" Zude was shaking her. Jez opened her eyes. "You were laughing! Are you all right? You were almost hysterical. Jez!"

  Jez smiled, and wiped her cheeks. "Zudie," she said. Then, as noises of a waking city wafted through the window, she wrapped herself in her lover's arms and drew her once more into a sweet sleep.

  * * * * * * * *

  In a three-storied warehouse crammed with women representing all stages of dress and undress, all varieties and periods of costume, all shapes and sizes of props and accessories, all levels of technology and imagination, the women of Hong Kong gathered for a party. It was a sex party. And it was a party where, among other modes of interaction, dominance/submission opportunities filled the menu. Amahs, cadets, non-military citizens, and visitors from coastal caravansaries mingled -- and performed -- in a provocative coction of street-fair celebration and intensified interpersonal drama.

  Ardis the Banjar hung at a face-down angle, suspended thirty feet from the floor at the center of an intricate webbing of hempen lines. She held court there with floor-level admirers who marvelled at the warp and weft that sustained her.

  "Ardis," Cadet Jezebel Dolalicia called up to her, "there's a lot of nothing between you and the ground!"

  "Jezebel!" Ardis beamed. "It's true. But it's so easy when you know how!"

  Jez's eyes played over the stalls and vendors that lined the lower level, the piercing and tattoo artists, the ranks of sex toys and exotic fabrics, the banquet of edible ice sculpted into female forms, the raucous parlor games. She walked through the crowds in the company of her Future Self, a palpable Presence who held her hand in assurance of serenity and openness.

  Occasionally that Self whispered, "Breathe, Jezebel."

  On one of the darkened upper levels she wandered as a welcome voyeur through lume-pockets of sexual activity. There, typically, she could watch a single woman's expression of sexual desire and the excited gratification of other women who bent their every effort toward the full satisfaction of that desire. The hand of the Future Jezebel held her steady, gifting her with tolerance and even, at times, appreciation.

  At one moment when she stood with other voyeurs observing such a scene, her eyes fell on her lover far across the room. Zude was the center of a group of cadets, exploding with them in rowdy laughter at some oft-told tale of academy life. Deliberately, she turned back to the lume-scene and imagined her lover, splayed naked in thralldom, like the woman there. Zude in bondage, and hungry.

  It rose again, that thrill of mastery and flame, summoned from such unfamiliar wellsprings. And hard on its heels, the horror and the sickening self-loathing. Jez flailed backward to the support of an upright girder. Wildly, she flung out her arm again, reaching for the Presence, for the woman she knew she would become. Instantly her Future Self responded with the handclasp of support. In that moment Jez gained her internal victory. Her body eased.

  "How can I," she said aloud, "how-- "

  "Rejoice," said her guide.

  "But I'm not-- "

  "You are bo
th. You are all. Rejoice." The figure beside her moved. "Come. There is more."

  In the company of her new-found guide, Jez weathered the evening's intermingling of sex and violence. The explicit and abhorrent message seemed clear. "Women," it said, "can be violators, too, and this is the way we shall treat each other: with men's weapons, men's uniforms, men's power, men's arrogance, men's titillations. We play here in this domain of men, and we enjoy it. We are masters of it." Her control served her to the last dregs of the party.

  It was close to the witching hour of three when she and Zude emerged from the darkened pier building where the party had taken place. Through the trees they could see small boats bobbing at their moorings. In their accustomed walking posture, elbows bent with forearms locked and fingers intertwined, they wound their way through the bowers of wisteria that marked a path by the harbor.

  Zude broke the silence. "Bella-Belle, I need to hear from you." When Jez did not respond, she continued. "You see, love, it's not violence. It's about consent. Nothing is done against another's will."

  Jez shook her head, disrupting the evenness of their walking. "I'm breathing," she sent to her inner guide. "I'm breathing and I'm in control." Aloud she said calmly, "Zude, it's not enough to say that violence is what's done against our will. That's a hollow definition for me. Consent isn't the key."

  Zude didn't push her. Still ecstatic at Jez's apparent openness, she chanced some levity. "Confess it, best beloved," she teased, "you got off tonight on some . . ." She caught herself. "Jez, I mean-- "

  Jez had halted their progress. She stood looking at Zude. "Yes," she said evenly. "Yes, I did." Neither breathed. "And I was sickened by that, by my reaction." She moved away abruptly to the support of a nearby cypress tree. When she turned back to Zude she was flushed. She spoke through a flood of tears. "Zudie, don't you see? What went on in that warehouse tonight was just an imitation of men's control games! I don't want that between us!"

  Zude moved toward her lover. "They're not men's games, Jezebel. They're human games!"

  "Wrong!" Jez exploded, the thin fabric of her composure finally rent asunder. She warded off Zude's move to touch her. "And who the hell are the Kanshou anyway, that they spend their lives fighting men's violence in the streets and then glorify it here? How can they pontificate at the academy about the horrors of slavery . . . and about men's abuse of animals! . . . and then put the very women they say they 'love' in cages and collars and leashes and chains? Zude, I don't want I don't want to turn into that!"

  She struck the tree with her fist. Then she looked at Zude, her voice soft. "And you think Amahs and Vigilantes and Femmedarmes are going to rid the world of violence? Never, Zudie! They're taking us right back to where the men had us in the first place!" She leaned, head down, against the cypress.

  Breathe, whispered her Future Self.

  In that same moment Zude bent close to Jez's ear. "Jezebel," she said softly, "we have a room at the Hideaway. I'd like to go there with you now." She took Jez's hand. "No roles, no toys, no games. Just you and me."

  Jez lifted her head and searched Zude's face. Slowly, she straightened, then yielded to the breath imprisoned by her rage. It blew freedom through her guarded body and rarefied her thickened mind. It sent her, a zephyr of desire, into Zude's astonished arms.

  When they had moved clear of the cypress trees, Zude stepped behind her lover and drew the long body tight against her own. They bent their knees and closed their eyes, breathing themselves into an intimate alignment.

  "By all the dreams we've walked together," said Zude.

  "By all the love with which we've filled the vessels of our lives," said Jezebel.

  They intoned a harmony, tumbled inward, and touched familiar reaches of a vista that opened to the stars. They lifted Earth-free feet and leapt above the rolling boats to sail together over Hong Kong's twinkling lights.

  4 - Parting – [2069-2087 C.E.]

  Cadets and Sea-Shrieves aboard a light transfer craft were downloading ancient munitions from a cargo vessel for the Kowloon Military Museum when a midship explosion set off serial on-deck fulminations. The conflagration that followed threatened the cargo vessel and attending personnel.

  Unexpectedly, choppy harbor waves poured over the cargo ship, rolling it to a near-capsize but extinguishing the flames completely. One of the eight cadets cast overboard had to be resuscitated, and six more were treated for burns. Miraculously, no lives were lost.

  Two eye-witness reports concur that almost simultaneous with the explosion, Third Form Amah Cadet Dolalicia "summoned waves of water" from the calms of Hong Kong Harbor, shaped them into a wall that rose above the ship,and thus drenched the conflagration.

  --Amah Academy Service Log 1423, 10-3-2069

  Dossroom Three of the Tsui Building was cantilevered into the willow trees that flanked the gateway to the Hong Kong Amahrery Cadet Academy. In the winter afternoon light, leafy patterns flung themselves through the skylights onto forty crisp-cornered cots footed by forty red lockers. Forty dress uniforms of red and black hung in plastasis to the right of forty stiff pillows, and forty long windows separated the areas from each other by a few feet. Above each bed, neatly concealed ceiling chutes held drop shelves of wardrobes and toiletries. Idle glolobes, with focus or spread capacity, hung suspended in midair over each bed.

  Animal figures, astonishingly lifelike and in a variety of postures, graced almost half the beds: stalking tigers or wolves, eagles or hawks in full flight, dolphins, foxes, turtles, snakes, bears, and a number of other species, including one spider. Some were full-sized, others reduced in size but no less imposing. They guarded their modest human fiefdoms with the dignity appropriate to their status as totem, companion, or spirit-guide.

  The floor chronometer barely whispered its pulse.

  From the upchute, arguing voices resounded in the empty dossroom.

  "Just tell me how you did it, Jez, and I'll leave you in peace!"

  Jez shot out of the chute with Zude just behind her. "Psychic bench presses. Mass hypnosis." Jez raced down the central row of silent cots to her own berth. She began working her way out of her ryndon comfortsuit.

  "And when the dust clears at the dock and everybody's back here talking about it forever, what do I say?"

  "You say what you saw. Zude, you're not my keeper!"

  Zude caught Jez by the shoulders and turned her toward her. "Right. I'm your lover!" She shook her. "Remember me?"

  Jez pulled away from her and began climbing into a woodswarmth tunic.

  Zude leapt in front of Jezebel, flinging her arms wide. "Listen to me!" she shouted. Jez froze. Zude pointed to herself. "I'm your Faithful Zudie, and I've been traipsing after you for weeks! But every time I think I've caught you, you just pat my hand like a nanny and then discorporate like a cloud!" She leaned toward Jez. "I bring you a kiss-cola and a rose, because you're off on a 90-k trek and all I get from you is a glassy-eyed stare. Then to top it all off, this afternoon I watch while this strange woman who is supposed to be my best beloved picks up half the South China Sea and puts out a fire that otherwise could have killed eight people!"

  Zude paused. Jez held her gaze.

  The willows had stopped waving. The chronometer hushed. Neither woman breathed. Nothing stirred in the sunlit dossroom. Seventeen silent witnesses regarded the scene with wise eyes.

  Jez's shoulders rounded. She dropped her head.

  Zude's hand hovered an instant by Jez's shoulder. Then she sank to the cot, her arms resting on her wide hipbones, her limp hands filling the emptiness between her thighs.

  "You're going."

  Jez released a soft whimper. Then her arms stiffened and she threw her head wide to the ceiling, moaning in an upward glissando to a full-bodiedroar.

  Zude closed her eyes. The breath she exhaled rasped awkwardly and then flooded like a wild tributary into Jez's rising wail. The sounds ceased simultaneously as the two women collapsed sobbing into each other and into the narrow space between
the cots, wrapped in a familiar holding. On the white tiled floor of Doss Three, they sat rocking back and forth until the sun had tilted another inch in the sky.

  When at last they could look at each other, Jez freed one of the twin rampant unicorns which was caught up in her lover's black hair. Zude lowered her eyes and then closed them, leaning back against the bed, her body lifeless for perhaps the first time in its waking life.

  Jez's whisper reverberated in the empty dossroom. "Come with me, Zudie." She pressed Zude's limp hand.

  From the bottom of her belly a cynical laugh rose silently out of Amah Cadet Lieutenant Adverb. Then she gave the laugh its voice. "Come with you? Me?" Large tears began rolling down her cheeks. "And what would you do with me, Bella-Belle? Carry me with you from fair to fair, the Beautiful Witch Jezebel's bonzai handmaiden, who holds her greatcoat while the miraculous lady performs acts of wonder?" The tears poured effortlessly now, drenching Zude's tunic. "Maybe I could get a job dispatching flex-cabs to bring the old and the infirm to your magic healing shows."

  Jez flushed. "Unkind, Zudie."

  Zude nodded. She pressed her forehead to Jez's and whispered, "True. It was unkind. Erase, please."

  Jez placed Zude's hands on her own brown head and then took Zude's head in her own hands, completing the ritual. "Erased." They held their brows together for a long moment.

  Zude wiped her hand over her face, then on her loose-fitting pants. Jez caught a wet tear on Zude's chin. She wiped it on her own tunic.

  "Zudie, it may sound crazy, but I'm reaching for a part of you that questions all this just like I do."

  Zude opened her eyes.

  "All this," Jez whispered. "The academy. The Kanshoubu. And all that they stand for."

  Zude searched her lover's face.

  "Look," Jez said, "I'm not leaving because I have some place to go. I don't know where I'll go. I'm leaving because I can't stay here. Every day I'm putting up another wall against what I truly know within myself, blanking out options, limiting possibilities" She wiped tears from her own eyes. "Killing my spirit." She pulled herself close to Zude's face. "And, my love, you're doing the same thing."

 

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